Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel

by Chappell, Greg

  Rather, of the initial friction between Chappell and a section of the team he says that “like anything, sometimes it takes a bit of time for people to understand what the other person is trying to do and achieve. I think the guys have responded very well. I’ve really enjoyed it. In a lot of ways he’s trying to bring in some new thoughts, some new ideas. We have our opinions and sometimes we agree and sometimes we might disagree. At the end of the day, he’s done a really good job. He’s trying to coach teams in a slightly different way. I think it’s a good way.”

  What way is that? “I think he believes in giving different people different experiences so that they can learn and grow from those experiences, whether it is from different kinds of drills in practice or in match play, so that your mind has a variety of options to choose from. A big believer in the mental side of things.”

  Listening to Dravid, watching him work, you sometimes worry that he is consumed by an intensity that can burn, torn by “the trances of torment” of Melville’s Captain Ahab, who “sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms”. In truth, experience, not least time spent banished from the one-day team, and now a wholesome family life, has taught him that at some level there is nothing that is too important.

  When asked, for instance, why Mark Taylor is among his favourite captains, the immediate response does not address Taylor’s tactical sparkle. Rather it is because “he had a lot of balance, I felt. Equanimity. About Mark you felt that he always treated this as a game, nothing more and nothing less.”

  Maybe it is this outlook, and Dravid’s obvious intelligence, that allows him to bring to his captaincy a Taylor kind of adventure – ploy upon ploy, trick upon trick, never passive. “Basically,” he says, “I believe you’ve got to keep the game moving.”

  Enough has been seen so far to say that his major calls have been characterised by, one, the emphasis on team over individual, and two, the inclination to take the gamble so long as there is some cricketing logic involved. He prefers not to discuss the Multan declaration with Tendulkar on 194, but is happy to delve into other instances that provide insight into a variety of aspects of his decision-making.

  One from the micro level. During the outstanding defence of 106 in Mumbai against the Australians in 2004, he famously threw the ball to Murali Kartik ahead of Anil Kumble in the fifth over of the fourth innings. Kartik responded with two wickets from his first six deliveries.

  “What happened there was that when I was batting in the second innings and Michael Clarke came on to bowl, he immediately started getting a lot of spin, and he bowled with a round-arm flat action. He was virtually impossible to play, bowling fast, straight balls that were spinning. There was no time to react to that. When I was batting it crossed my mind that Murali Kartik would definitely be a great option on the wicket to right-handers, because he can push the ball through faster. But the good thing there was that Zaheer Khan took the wicket of Justin Langer in the first over – that was a very critical thing, Zaheer’s wicket, people forget that. It exposed [the right-handers] Ricky Ponting and Damien Martyn when it mattered, and I could get Kartik on.”

  In one-day cricket he has been an aggressive tactician, preferring at every turn the attacking option and often the left-field one. As far back as October 2003, again versus Australia in Mumbai, he opened the bowling with a spinner while standing in as captain. It did not quite come off – but it did provide a glimpse into his thinking. In Sri Lanka last July he showed that, particularly in defence of medium totals, he was prepared to risk looking foolish by keeping catchers on and the field up. But, he adds: “It depends on the quality you have. It’s all very well to say, “Put only two guys out.” For example, I can easily bring the field in for Harbhajan Singh but not so easily for Virender Sehwag. They are different bowlers, their level of consistency is different, their thinking is different.”

  Most revealing of his readiness to take risks have been the (largely successful) batting orders, which may seem to have been generated by an iPod shuffle but were, he explains, prompted as much by long-term strategy as plan for the day.

  “How do you sometimes get the best out of people?” he asks. “By challenging them. From personal experience I’ve seen that batting at different positions has made me think about my cricket differently. I had to bat at No. 3 for a part of my career in the one-day game, batted at No. 5, kept wickets, batted at No. 6, No. 4. The demands have been different. It’s obviously opened up my game. I’m hoping it will help a lot of others as well.”

  Long-term-view, too, were the decisions to rest Tendulkar and himself in consecutive games against Sri Lanka. Though the series was in the bag, the team had just found form, just managed to curb the increasing cynicism of the watching public. More conservative minds would have chosen not to tinker. More insecure souls would not have dared, at that stage, grant captaincy to another, even if for only one game.

  “It’s just that when you’re on the road and playing a lot of cricket, there’s a lot of physical pressure and a lot of mental and emotional pressure. I don’t think the same XI is going to be able to play the whole season for you. People need just a little bit of a break to recharge their batteries. In fact, when we’re playing a lot of one-day cricket I think there might even be a case for someone who doesn’t play to go back home and spend two days with his family. More can be gained by taking that time off than another long net practice. These are things we need to be aware of.”

  Perhaps Dravid’s strongest batting-order call came not in one-dayers but in the Delhi Test against Sri Lanka. With Virender Sehwag missing the game, Dravid promoted himself to open. He was on antibiotics for a viral flu, had been unable to make it to practice the previous day, and the voice escaped his body as if through a jute towel stuffed in the gullet. And he had failed in each of his seven previous innings as Test opener. In another time the wicketkeeper or the newest member might have been sent up.

  Dravid rejects the suggestion that it was about making a statement or setting an example. “It was a tactical decision. Losing Veeru opened up the situation. I knew there would be a bit in the wicket in the morning. I didn’t want to expose the middle order, and since I do bat at No. 3 and play the new ball quite often, I thought I would be the best equipped to handle it.” In the second innings, with quick runs the need of the hour, Irfan Pathan was sent in and the delightfully well-rounded stripling responded with a decisive 93. Dravid did not displace the strokeful VVS Laxman from the No. 3 slot he had occupied in the first innings.

  In short, unnerving, but he seems to have it basically sussed. Creative but not absurd, ruthless but fair, diplomatic but articulate, ambitious but grounded, demanding but not dictatorial, progressive in every way, he has the makings of a complete captain for the age. He even looks happy in skins.

  Inevitably a time will come when the team will lose and it is only then that Dravid will truly be tested and only by his response to that can he truly be assessed. Between them, Dravid and Chappell have taken or precipitated decisions of the type not usually associated with Indian cricket. Having done so, they’ve also turned up the heat on themselves. The challenge before the combine, even if neither may say it, is to better the successes of the Ganguly-Wright era, for that is how they will ultimately be gauged by the public.

  But to talk of this as the Dravid era suggests a kind of discontinuity from the past. For him it has been the same journey and it goes on. Six years ago, in a bid to overcome the staleness that had crept into his game, he spent a summer at Kent, which he regards as a key phase in his own self-understanding. It was there he met John Wright, whom he subsequently recommended to the board, and from there began a grandly exhilarating, grandly fluctuating period for Indian cricket, with his co-debutant at the helm and in which Dravid himself was performer-in-chief. In many ways it is Dravid who is the central bond between the eras. How does he look back on the
last five years, the thrilling rise, the sagging end? In what ways has the approach changed? Flexibility, “total cricket”, there’s been a lot going on. What’s coming?

  “John did a fantastic job for us for the time that he came in. You must never forget that. He and Sourav had a good combination and they did some very good things for four years. John worked really hard and made sure we worked really hard. A lot of us raised the bar during the period. He created the right environment and evolved a sense of team in a lot of things that we did.”

  His voice rises a touch and the earnestness is striking. “You know, teams go through ebbs and flows, things like team spirit, things like performances, they have to be constantly worked on. Just because you have it today doesn’t mean you have it tomorrow. You have to constantly reinforce it. Over a period of time, due to a lot of factors, maybe complacency to a certain extent, injuries to some extent, we struggled a bit. We’ve got to try and get that back. We’re trying.

  “I think there’s a lot of focus now on trying to get better at skill, thinking about the game a lot more… It’s early days… it’s going to take time. I don’t want to start saying that it’s something huge. Part of it has been necessitated by circumstances, part of it by need, part of it by what we’re thinking and where we want to go…”

  He weighs his words. “Like I said, it’s going to take time… We want a good team… We’re looking to challenge people… We’re looking to take it forward.” He leaves it at that. There’s not much more to ask.

  Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the cricket tour book Pundits from Pakistan. He was contributing editor at Cricinfo Magazine when this article was first published there in January 2006.

  The great innings

  His batting is not, for some, immediately appealing; it is like some paintings, it requires a second look, a considered appreciation. Soon its beauty is revealed, its simple elegance, its clean, classical lines, its divorce from awkwardness, its stylish symmetry. He plays to his own wondrous sheet music.

  Rohit Brijnath, Twin treatises in courage, page 107

  [ 14 ]

  Hercules on second fiddle

  SIDHARTH MONGA

  VVS Laxman’s epochal 281, among the greatest Test match performances of all time, stopped Australia’s juggernaut in its tracks in Kolkata in 2001. It threw into the shade an innings that in any other game would have been the main event: Rahul Dravid’s 180, the epitome of sweat and toil, made in the teeth of extreme physical discomfort. For Dravid, it never came easy; this classic least of all.

  180 v Australia, second Test, Kolkata, 2001

  Until the afternoon of March 13, 2001, Rahul Dravid was a batsman too obsessed with technique to score runs. On that day, despite an average of 52.23 in 42 Tests, he found himself in a corner. Against the three best attacks of that time, Pakistan, Australia and South Africa, he averaged 27, 29 and 36 respectively. Take out Zimbabwe and he had not scored a fifty in over a year. He struggled to score singles, finding fielders with well-timed shots. It was said he was thus building pressure on other batsmen, coming to bat as he did at No. 3. Shane Warne seemed to have a hold over Dravid, dismissing him a day earlier for the seventh time in seven and a half Tests. In the last two of those, Dravid, shy of moving well forward, had been bowled.

  On March 13, not for the last time in his career, Dravid swapped places with a batsman who often took out with him a wand instead of a bat. It was a desperate move from a desperate side, and one rich in cricketing logic from what was going to become a successful side. India had just come out of the match-fixing scandal and were under a new captain and coach. If this was a bout, they were being manhandled by a professional, richly talented, deliberate-to-the-last-detail, bullying Australian side. The knockout punch was about to be delivered when India instinctively threw up VVS Laxman in defence.

  What followed was so blissful and magical, even the hard-nosed Australians were won over, putting behind poor umpiring and falling over each other to congratulate the miracle-makers. If Laxman caressed India out of trouble, Dravid chose the only way he knew: fighting through it, never mind that he had to play the pick-up truck to Laxman’s Rolls Royce, preferring to struggle out in the public eye than trying to hit his way out of form. For one full session he hobbled through for his runs, took tablets and saline drinks for cramps. He was denied a runner and at one point even drinks, but he’d be damned if he played one loose shot in Kolkata’s humidity of over 90%.

  If Laxman was writing poetry at the other end, Dravid was just rediscovering the alphabet at his. A day ago he had been bowled by a Warne legbreak that pitched about four feet outside his crease, on the line of leg; and yet he couldn’t reach it, and was bowled. The feet were not leaving the crease at all, and he was not reaching the pitch of the ball. India were bowled out in 58.1 overs, thus having failed to reach 300 against Australia in ten straight innings. Laxman, though, counterattacked, and was the last man out, for 59 off 83 balls. When Laxman came back, the coach, John Wright asked him to not take off his pads, and to go in at No. 3 in the next innings.

  Wright’s reasoning was damning for Dravid. “Watching Laxman make 59 while batting with the tail, I remembered Ian Chappell arguing that your No. 3 batsman should be a strokeplayer, someone who took the attack to the opposition, and put away the bad ball,” Wright wrote in John Wright’s Indian Summers. “Dravid was our regular first-drop, but he hadn’t hit his straps; his partnership with Tendulkar in Mumbai had been slow. We simply weren’t taking the initiative.” Ian Chappell was one of the commentators for the match, and he felt it was a mental thing with Dravid, that he needed to forget technique and score runs. The switch was working, too: Laxman was nearing a century by the time Dravid came out to bat, eight overs before stumps on March 13, and India had taken off all but 42 runs of the 274-run deficit.

  Smaller men have sulked and lost interest at such times, weaker men have tried to show the coach and captain they too can hit boundaries. Dravid swallowed it all and came out to fight the biggest fight of his career. Off the first 52 balls he faced, either side of stumps on day three, he scored just nine runs. He couldn’t find the sweet part of the bat, he hit too hard, Warne looped the balls high, as if to a kid, Michael Kasprowicz bowled 14 straight dots at him.

  When the umpire erroneously ruled a leg-bye as a single off the 15th Kasprowicz delivery Dravid faced, the bowler came up to him and asked, “Which part of your bat did it hit?” Australia must have felt it was only a matter of time before Dravid succumbed, and they didn’t want him to get easy runs, any runs. At the other end, Laxman toyed with similar deliveries, having hit 20 fours in his 113. Umpire SK Bansal would soon join the drive. When Jason Gillespie – how well he bowled without any reward that day – got one to snarl at Dravid, the inside edge for four was ruled leg-byes. Dravid would have taken any runs then.

  In the next over Laxman mis-hit a pull off Glenn McGrath. Soon Dravid followed a short-of-length delivery, coming close to edging it. Now McGrath started his famous mumble, all the way back to the top of his mark, the crowd began to dance, Dravid gritted his teeth and went back to struggling. Back foot in front of leg, front foot slightly open, the bat going up and down three times as the bowler ran in, the sweat beginning to drip already. He was only 11 off 69, and this was only the first hour. Wright wrote random notes on his laptop, Sourav Ganguly sat with a towel draped over his bare chest.

  In the next over, Laxman inside-edged Gillespie for four in much the same manner as Dravid. Laxman now took the most dangerous bowler on, off-driving, steering and cover-driving him for three more fours in that over. In the next over Dravid went at a wide delivery, punching McGrath slightly awkwardly through the vacant mid-off region, and it seemed he would now be away. The innings, though, was devoid of any flow or pattern: soon he would be beaten by one that held its line outside off. At the end of that over, the 90th, drinks arrived. The first hour had be
en negotiated.

  In the first over after drinks, Dravid found timing, perhaps for the first time, when he cut McGrath, but not placement. The next ball stayed low. He was equal to it. Then he began moving forward to counter the variable bounce. McGrath went round the stumps, and this time Dravid convincingly punched him through mid-off for four. In the next over he sparred at a kicker from Kasprowicz. At 26 off 92, he was still looking for some sustained rhythm but not giving up.

  Then Dravid got a length ball on the pads, which he clipped wide of the fielder deep on the leg side. First signs he was in. Leading up to lunch the scoring rate increased. The clip into the leg side, at times from in front of off, remained the profitable shot. By lunch he was 50 off 127, but that came with its fair share of trouble too… from Ricky Ponting, who had been having a horror series with the bat. With the ball, he swung away at gentle pace, bringing the odd one back in. Two of those inswingers could have – on another day – had Dravid lbw. One was a touch-and-go not-out with regard to the impact vis-à-vis off stump, and the other hit him marginally outside.

  India added 122 in the session. Australia’s over rate stayed good, and the fields attacking, even if India had begun to build a lead. At lunch they were 102 ahead. Forty minutes later Wright said to Laxman and Dravid, “See you after the next session.” Laxman nonchalantly drove the first ball after lunch for four. Dravid repeated the dose to near-nemesis Ponting in the next over. Just when it began to look easy, Ponting got one to rear at Dravid’s gloves. Laxman called for a quick single. He stopped. He resumed. He was short. He dived. Laxman. Dived to make the crease. They were not going to get out today. Not even run out.